


Prelude

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 02:25:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14823446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	Prelude

It’s the middle of March when the almost imperceptible shift occurs. In the irregular hilliness of the valley, spring doesn’t exactly serve as a separate season; rather, it sits as a label for the two-month period when the weather fluctuates between ‘Malibu’ and ‘Nome’ without pause for breath or appropriate wardrobe adjustments in between.

The obnoxiously happy green of new leaves stains the landscape.

Hux’s favorite run leads through a badly maintained park. It is beautiful now, with the twisted deciduous trees leaning over the hiking path he jogs along. For a minute he pretends he’s somewhere else—a national park, maybe, in Maine. There the air would be thin and crisp, and the stars might speckle the sky in legitimately visible majesty. The most he could hope for at home is perhaps Orion’s Belt, if it would slip from the orange glow to the south for a few minutes. He imagines a sky that is truly dark: wide, and bright with other suns. Hux’s fantasy disappears as an especially large specimen of suburban tumbleweed (some gigantic wad of a grease-stained McDonald’s bag) gracelessly overtakes him, ballooning forwards on cool wind.

 _Banksy would have a field day_ , he thinks.

It’s particularly pleasant outdoors—sixty degrees, slight breeze. He arrives back at the high school track pink with exertion, and wishing for winter. The assistant coach berates him gently for some aberration from his normal pace on the run, but Hux doesn’t care and is instead staring hungrily at the snow banks lining the inside of the track. This idiotic weather. It’ll snow again one week, and then be this gorgeous the next—

An especially odd tradition of the male track and field team centers around a combination of the phrases “The shorter the shorts, the faster the fast” and “Sky’s out, thighs out.” Hux regrets the length of his Nikes the minute someone with absolutely _no chill whatsoever_ tackles him into one of the previously enticing snow piles. Ice crystals aren’t easy on the ass.

For less than a second, the memory of shoveling aforementioned snow into such piles (while it was fresh, and light, and dry) during the winter season flits across the surface of his mind. The image flees when Hux lands, with an unimpressive thud, into the bank.  Ren ’s pinkish face appears several feet above him—the infuriating crooked grin intact—and Hux decides to lob a fistful of slush in retaliation, while peeling his spine out of the indentation it made in the snow. It’s cold as hell. The assistant coach has, wisely, retreated to the water cooler.

The rest of the team is involved in similar shenanigans. A six-point-five-mile road run results in extraordinary endorphin surges upon completion, and despite it not even being _that_ warm out, Hux ended up ripping his damp t-shirt over his head. Seconds later, he was dripping wet, and absolutely freezing. Fantastic.

 Ren pokes him in the ribs with one of his obnoxious pianist fingers. “You skinny fuck!” he offers, in a way of greeting.

“Good god,” Hux pants.  Ren is shirtless, too, but infinitely easier on the eyes that Hux’s skeletal torso. Melted snow spatters his left shoulder.

“What’re you doing after this? Come to Dunkin’ with me. I actually have gas this time, I promise.”

“Mhm.” Dunkin’ Donuts is the kind of place Hux goes only if it’s extremely late at night, or if he’s high as a kite. Neither of those conditions apply. It also entails food. Sugary, greasy food.

“Hux, you never leave the house.”

“I know.”

 Ren crouches to fix a shoelace. Hux watches a mole on his right forearm move gently with the motions of his hands.

Hux heads back towards the locker rooms. He wants to get home and cram, and Ren ’s incredible torso was not going to stop him.  Ren doesn’t follow.

 

The driveway in front of his house is completely empty. Offering up a thank you to the sparse new leaves that flapped fifteen feet above his head, Hux fishes his key from an outer pocket of his backpack, jams it in the door, taps in the alarm code, and leans against the white-painted wall of the foyer for a few moments. He rips earbuds out of his phone and stuffs them in his pocket, un-pausing the song and letting it play though the phone’s speakers instead. He was home alone, what the hell.

Dropping his backpack by a staircase and setting his violin somewhat more gently down next to it, Hux heads directly into the kitchen. His brother had been home yesterday, there’d been takeout involved.

David Bowie’s distorted warble emanates from the phone, which Hux has tossed unceremoniously on the kitchen counter.

He opens the fridge and removes a half-empty container of kung pao chicken. He opens it, sniffs it briefly, pronounces it edible, and then digs through several different drawers in search of useable chopsticks. It probably could have been so much easier and faster to use one of the various forks lying around but doing so would have smacked of some kind of lack of culture and ability. Even though he was alone, Hux would not stoop to the level of eating Chinese with a fork. It irked him.

He hadn’t exactly eaten much that day—he wasn’t in a habit of eating well. Though advanced placement exams were over a month away, he’d started sleeping with his contact lenses in, so he could wake up every few hours to continue working, and avoid wearing glasses with the wrong prescription or falling down the stairs. Apparently, he was now subsisting entirely off of cold Chinese food. Even programming the microwave for a minute meant fewer lines of Caesar translated, and Hux wasn’t one for delayed gratification, either.

He gulps the chicken down quickly, barely pausing to breathe. Shit, he hadn’t realized how hungry he actually was. But it passes a few moments later—the grease coats his mouth, his throat, tickling his gag reflex. Ugh. He bites his tongue, stumbles sideways for a few feet towards the bathroom, and pukes.

 _Jesus fucking Christ_ , the sensible part of Hux screams, _what the hell is wrong with you?_

“It’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love,” David Bowie says.

“Shut up,” Hux says.

The mid-afternoon sun falls onto Hux’s hair, and drips onto the tiles of the bathroom.

 

The Metro North was one of Hux’s favorite modes of transportation. The seats were his favorite colors. He could choose which train to take, whether he wanted to waste or make up time. There was no traffic. He could buy a monthly pass with a metro card on the other side, stick it inside his phone case, and feel a little bit freer.

It also gave him now an uninterrupted opportunity to observe his right ankle. He prodded it with his index finger. That hurt. He decided to forgo any further experiments and instead just lace up his high top as tightly as possible, and hope for the best.

Not one of his shining moments, really. He’d ended up at the wrong 125th street, and was out of money. So, he decided the best course of action would be an on-foot trek through downtown Harlem, during which his right ankle rolled mercilessly on an uneven bit of concrete. No, it wasn’t particularly impressive. He would have to forego running for a bit. But that was really the most unfortunate thing about the injury. Hux had always healed quickly.

 

Compared to the rest of the house, the basement is unimpressive. Insulation hangs, thinning, from the ceiling, and it smells of mold and wet stone. Hux is squatting by the heating pipes—there is no furniture—and tries to encapsulate an extremely excited mutt in his arms. The dog does not want to be held and wanders off only after licking Hux’s hair out of place. Slightly disgruntled at the rebuff, he runs his right hand through orange strands and gives up entirely on reassembling its previous shape.  stands up, in a motion too smooth for the stress the position probably put on his knees and brushes off his slacks. Not only was the floor slightly damp, it was also apparently covered in dust.

He wondered where Ren had gone. He was Hux’s ride, after all, and if the idiot had just fucked off into the mildly chilly night then Hux would have a little bit of a problem. The basement suddenly felt claustrophobic, stale, poisonous—dodging tipsy sophomores and the crowd surrounding a ping pong table, Hux decided to lope upstairs and snoop.

The house was vast. He’d recognized it by the famously useless balcony jutting out above the front door as Ren drove up. The idiotic embellishment was completely inaccessible from inside, and should one actually desire to use it, they’d need climbing shoes and probably a grappling hook. _Stupid_ , Hux thought.

Hux walked silently through a dining room. He looked at an open Nine West shoebox on a cabinet, beside a bust of what looked suspiciously like Mark Zuckerberg, and a vase of dead flowers. A chandelier swayed slightly, casting thin, vibrating shadows across the yellow-painted walls. It struck him then that he had no idea who lived here. Some shadowy teenaged Jay Gatsby? A bunch of squatters? The chief of police? The list of possibilities was mostly uninteresting, and Hux couldn’t care less about the truth. A painting stared disinterestedly at the corner of the room, a portrait of a girl with milkmaid braids and a moon-like face. It was an odd stylistic contrast with the Zuckerberg bust.

Soft trap music bounced from speakers beneath Hux’s feet, but as he ran his fingertips across the crooked frame of what might have been a Bouguereau, he recognized something else. Hux hadn’t been drinking, and he wasn’t on anything. But why on earth would anyone be playing Rachmaninoff with free alcohol present?

The shimmering treble notes were barely audible, but to one who knew the song well, they existed exactly where they should have been. _G sharp minor_ , Hux thought. He followed the sound.

It took a few minutes. The carpeting in the upstairs hallways was so plush Hux felt as if he was leaving extremely incriminating footprints. The Rachmaninoff grew louder and more familiar as Hux chased it around labyrinthine corridors—a treadmill in the hallway. Bathrooms from which multiple voices emanated. Another dog. Hux remained undeterred. He had to find the source before the final coda or the entire escapade would have set up a situation that would collapse within itself, and the surreal vibration that snapped through the air might flee. The carpeting was red.

Hux finds the grand piano in the room behind the decorative outdoor balcony. He recognizes the thatch of hair that flops in time to a slightly irregular beat, which wavers without aid of a metronome. The end of the piece is unsurprisingly gentle. Hux has heard it many times.

The silence persists for one out-of-character moment.

“Ren,” he says. It’s a statement on its own.

Kylo Ren, ex-competitive pianist, cryptic legal adult in need of a haircut, does not deign his closest confidant with an immediate response. He shakes a few fingers through greasy-looking hair and tries to pretend he isn’t breathing heavily. His mossy eyes gaze upwards for a moment, then back down again.

Hux pushes his glasses further up the bridge of his nose and crosses his arms over his skinny chest. He can feel something snarky already forming in the back of his throat, which would have been leveled directly at Ren should these have been ordinary circumstances. Yet the sedative provided by the strange house, the extraordinarily expensive piano tucked away in some red-tinged room, the thick vibrations that twanged through faintly air-conditioned molecules (though it’s too cold for that, Hux thought sluggishly)—it all stifled Hux’s first line of defense. He walks over to the bench.

Ren’s hands still rest gently on the last notes. Hux looks at the fingers in the way he always looks at them—with restrained admiration. They were long and capable, not spidery like his own. Hux had spent several of his far-from-proud moments imagining what it might be like to be under complete control of those hands—wrapped around his waist, grasping his back or his neck or gently lifting (or perhaps not so gently) his sweater over his head, parting his shirt, button by button. “Ren,” he says again, because something tells him that a whisper wouldn’t shatter the atmosphere in the wake of Ren’s performance.

Ren grinds his teeth, and Hux watches a muscle in his jaw pulse.

“I shouldn’t have let them get the better of me. I shouldn’t have stopped. I was so good. You know.”

Hux gulps in what he hopes was a quiet and unnoticeable kind of way.

Ren’s right hand is wrapped around Hux’s wrist. Hux does not object to this development and lets Ren tug his torso down so his eyes are level with Ren’s own. He shakes his hair from his forehead. Hux looks up. Ren’s forehead is slightly damp. His eyelashes cast odd shadows over the freckled tops of his cheekbones. Hux chews on his lower lip but stops as soon as he realizes he is doing so.

In a sudden swoop, Ren moves both his hands to Hux’s waist and lifts him up to the piano. Something within Hux screams in triumph, though he remains silent, as his inner chorus is answered in real time by the cacophonous clang of keys as Ren releases him somewhere around middle C.

Hux’s feet are still on the floor, and his knees rest against the bench where Ren sits, straddling Ren’s thighs. Their eyes meet, more softly than perhaps any time before, and nothing seems absurd at all for a moment. Hux closes the gap, his face ending up mere millimeters from Ren’s long nose. Ren meets him, willing, halfway.

 

Phasma liked to talk, but only around Hux. She wasn’t necessarily reticent around most others, but the minute they had any sort of time together, there were too many words and too few minutes. She’d already driven herself to the bike path by the highway, run five and half miles, bought herself a salad and some five-hour energy, and driven back to the high school. She was extremely pink, pedaling steadily in the stationary bike next to Hux.

“How’s yer ankle, you idiot? You weren’t even in heels—do you _know_ how difficult it is to walk in heels? You lived in this goddamn city for more’n half ya life but still manage to mistake one street for another—Jesus I _know_ they have the same name, but how could you not _tell_ , Huxy. Seriously, have you been drinking water? Eating? Not takeout, you absolute fuck, _real_ food. Like. Cheese whiz. Quinoa. Y’know! Those headphones are hecka loud, kid, do you seriously want everyone knowing you listen to the _weird_ kind of Bowie when you work out? Wh—”

There was only one hill left in the programmed workout, and he’d burned almost three hundred and sixty calories. Hux’s ankle throbbed a little, but he assumed it would probably alleviate itself after the last six-minute stretch. Involuntarily, he bared his teeth against the strain. Catching sight of himself in the mirror across the room, he quickly snapped his mouth shut.

Phasma was still talking. Her lung capacity was, frankly, superhuman. Hux gasped out a friendly “ShutthefuckUP,” and squeezed his eyes closed for a moment.

When he opened them again, Ren was in front of him. Hux didn’t fall off the bike out of sheer terror the way he’d done the first time Ren thought it was a great idea to use whatever ninja stealth his misguided genome had bestowed upon him in an inopportune moment. Instead, Hux bared his teeth again and huffed sharply out of his nose. Six goddamned minutes.

Ren didn’t get the message. Ren doesn’t generally get the message, so nobody was surprised.

“Didja get that email?”

Hux had certainly received and given a timely reply to the email from the teacher. There was some sort of attachment to it, a .pdf, but he hadn’t opened it. It was probably irrelevant, and the email certainly didn’t mention anything about it.

He said nothing, spinning the pedals in time with the bass that thudded through his earbuds.

“Hux. The email.”

Sweet Jesus, his thighs burned. “I got,” Hux huffed, “the fucking email.”

Five minutes, fifteen seconds left.

 

Hux scrolled down the .pdf document with a growing sense of panic.

They were supposed to have finished _De_ fucking _Bello Gallico_ in December—and here he was, trying to make a PowerPoint about the content of Book VI on the second day of April. The exam in the middle of May was rapidly approaching, and the professor had only breached about 40% of the curriculum.

He called Ren.

Ren didn’t pick up.

Instead, Hux’s front doorbell rang. Shoving his phone in his pocket, Hux loped down a flight of stairs and opened it, not to the UPS worker that probably should have been there, but Ren.

Hux considered a few potential reactions, and decided upon _Oh, my god._

Ren walked in.

“I know about that Latin shit,” he said. “You were just salty when I mentioned it a few hours ago.” Damn him. That’s what the ordeal was while Hux was on the bike.

“You’re not alarmed? Not a little bit?”

“Meh. It can’t be worse than last year. You _do_ remember that.”

“Do I _remember_? Of course I remember. There’s nothing more fucking surreal than ten seventeen-year-olds in an overheated room quoting Catullus at an extremely old and deformed probable pervert. I honestly think I could have used therapy—”

Ren had ninja-ed himself over to Hux again. A personal space infringement. Hux didn’t step back. He’d enjoyed last Saturday. He’d enjoyed the inevitability of it. That in itself was slightly out of character, but they’d only had four months left. What the hell.

“Tu levior cortice et inprobo irancudior Hadria,” Ren said. His accent was awful.

“Ren, that’s not a fucking compliment.”

_You are lighter than a cork and angrier than the wicked Adriatic sea._

Hux had memorized this poem at some point, too. He knew where it was going.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Ren said, as a poor cover for the fact that he’d placed one of his ridiculous hands on the small of Hux’s back.  Hux’s body stuttered forward a little, the tip of his nose only millimeters away from Ren’s. That wasn’t hard, though, Ren’s nose was approximately the length of the entirety of Long Island. Hux breathed lightly.

“Um,” Hux said. He wasn’t exactly good at this.

“Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam libens.”

Ren’s nose brushed Hux’s own.

_I would love to live with you, I, willing, would die with you._

“You know that’s an exaggeration. I hope it is. I assume whenever people say that it’s only for the metaphorical impact of it. Who even dies for anyone else on purpose in the twenty-first—”

Ren tasted like the Chipotle burrito that was probably still sitting in his car. Hux elected to ignore that and proceeded anyway in allowing himself to be backed up against the wall.

This was fine. Better than before, even. Ren’s lips weren’t as chapped. There was no threat of someone else drunkenly stumbling upon them while snooping around a mansion.

And then Ren was suddenly absent. Hux hadn’t realized that his eyes had closed. He opened them, sheepish. Ren looked at him as if he’d said something completely obvious that Hux didn’t comprehend.

“What?”

Ren turned and opened Hux’s front door again, staring down his nose at the slighter teen before speaking.

“Come with me. Just for a little.”

 Hux’s parents were both in Portland for at least forty-eight more hours. He turned off his phone, and left it on the couch.

“Fine.”

 

Mere minutes late, Hux found himself gripping the sides of the battered bucket seat in the passenger side of Ren’s father’s car. It was named, for some idiotic reason, the _Millennium Falcon_. It was the most beat-up jeep Hux had ever had the pleasure of freaking out in, and only because this particular one was making worrying noises and careening down the parkway at one hundred and fifteen miles per hour, seconds after merging.

“Ren! Holy fuck, Ren! Oh my god! Oh, no, oh god! Ren!”

“WHAT?”

The windows were also open. Hux felt like he would probably accept, without hesitation, whatever horrendous crash they were about to get into if it would cease this bullshit.

The roaring of the air decreased, as apparently only Ren had control over the windows. It was comparatively silent. The car slowed slightly, juttering along at ninety-five.

“It’s only twenty minutes to Long Island,” Ren said quietly.

“ _LONG ISLAND?_ ”  Hux’s own voice sounded too high, too loud in the space. He tried again.

“Why Long Island?”

Ren chewed on his lower lip as he swerved around a Honda.

“I don’t know. It’s nice.”

Ren seemed to have decided on something besides their location in that moment.

“We’re going to a graveyard.”

“A graveyard,” Hux said.

The car hiccupped again; Ren lowered the speed. Hux stopped clutching the seat.

“Why do you go so fast? _How_ do you go so fast?”

Electing to ignore the second part of Hux’s query, Ren shrugged. “Because I’m allowed. Check inside the sun visor on your side.”

Hux opened it. He stared at his own red-rimmed eyes for a moment in the tiny mirror before a laminated piece of paper fell down into his lap.

_Han Solo, official police business._

A dead man’s license.

“Ren—”

Ren cleared his throat and refused to let a red minivan merge.

“I can park wherever I want, too. It’s actually super convenient.”

“Ah.”

 

_The Whitestone Bridge was visible from the window in the kitchen._

_Ren used to subconsciously fancy that it was made entirely from bone—white bone, white stone. It didn’t look like bone, though, it looked like concrete. Ren wasn’t exactly sure where the fantasy first came from—it just seemed to make sense._

_In the darkest minutes of the city night, the bridge would twinkle high beyond the lights on the parkway beyond the apartment. Headlights and streetlamps shed vague stains on the brownish sky._

_“Pretty,” his mother used to say. Years before, it was an unspoken ritual that they would both watch the sun slip behind the buildings, seeing shadows erase the parking lot, the elevated train platform, and the power plant until only sputtering electric lights remained._

_It_ was _pretty._

_He narrowed his eyes now, and the bridge hung eerily behind the fingerprints on the surface of the glass. The wooden box he had been sitting on for hours was no less comfortable than when it was first presented. Ren had accepted it silently, accepted the usage of his birth name, and accepted the condolences. They’d known he’d been close to the dead man._

_The kitchen was ferociously bright and crisp, lit yellow by antique lamps._

_Ren tried not to look at the woman who stood by the dinner bell and did not speak. She had been beautiful, once, hinted at by the way she stood, the way she held her head and the shape of her mouth. Her graying hair sat in a braided crown, giving her an aura of royalty, despite having dedicated her life to the voice of the masses. Leia very rarely had the patience for mourning—she would never relegate herself to sitting on a wooden box, for a father who did nothing but cause irreparable damage. Her eyes hardened upon a glance at her son, who sat, chin in hand, staring out of the kitchen window._

_Next to her, the dinner bell swung gently. When Ren was small, he’d tried jumping to reach it—to ring it—but his hands were always slapped away by people with Leia’s eyes. He could touch it now, easily, but never exactly had the desire to do so._

Among the flavorless expanses of the cemetery, the only color that stood out was red.  It caused the rest of the landscape to dim; any spark of the hue seemed to dull its surroundings to an even and cold sepia.

There were various sparks of it scattered throughout the area: the tombstones were red.  They were faded and solid, but clearly red once.

The earth was red.  

Hux’s hair was red.

Han’s presence hovered. It surrounded the brittle crunch of dead grass beneath Ren’s black work boots. Though they weren’t the bright hue of Hux’s hair or the dirt around a fresh grave, the black a solid enough color to make the desert of the Long Island flatlands pale and wanting.

Anakin had passed after a forgivingly long amount of time, a surprisingly inconspicuous death. Han was a different case. 

The gravel pathway stretched into the horizon.  The wind mushroomed around Hux. He shuddered, turning into it, squinting at the Empire State Building, which stabbed white sky. He missed the _Falcon_ , and thought about its box of a body hunched by the wrought-iron entry gates.

Sometimes Hux believed he breathed too loudly for the preference of the dead. He feared that a huff through pink nostrils would cause them to rise and stare with black-hole eyes just to disapprove.

 

Ren used to mourn the deceased. _But I’m not a child_ , he thought, remembering the first lump of clay that splattered mundanely on the dark mahogany box that held his grandfather.

“I’m not a child,” Ren said, to the ectoplasmic man who now hovered beside him. Anakin was silent at first. Hux was ten yards away, kicking at the gravel in the path that cut between the stones.

Anakin pursed his transparent lips, crossing his legs at the ankle as he leaned weightlessly against his grave. One ghostly toe bobbed up and down.

 _Ben_ , he heard.  _Never sell_ The Concert _. It belongs to you._

A reply bubbled up in Ren’s throat. It would have been a combination of “That’s not my name,” “I don’t even know where it is” (a lie), and “How can you do this? Where are you now?” but instead of Anakin he would have said it to Hux, who stood in his place. He’d moved quite quickly from the other section of the graveyard.

“Good talk?”

Well. “We shouldn’t have come here, it’s cold as all fuck. Sorry.”

“Hardly.” Hux let the word fall between them, and drip onto the grave.

Ren knelt, and picked up a small pebble from nearby the stone. He placed it onto the grave beside the ghost of Hux’s utterance.

“I’m sorry. Let’s go get pizza. There’s a really good Italian place by here. I’ve been before. Hux—”

A muscle jumped in Hux’s jaw. His thin shoulders shuddered for a moment.

“I didn’t find Han. Is he here?”

Gnawing on his lower lip, Ren turned his back on Anakin’s grave. The wind pushed his hair into his mouth, his eyes.

“We don’t have to get pizza. Sorry. Dumb suggestion.”

“Forgotten.”

“I know this apartment by Coney Island.”

“Okay.”

_On the opposite wall from the silent dinner bell hung what was probably an impressive replication of a Vermeer._ The Concert _. It was a beautiful rendition. A rendition only._

_According to the dusty analog above the sink, it was one o’clock.  That had to be wrong, somehow, as the visitors had not packed up the snacks, and did not look as tired as they constantly complained to be._

_Anakin didn’t look tired, either, having materialized suddenly in the padded chair that used to be reserved for him. Ren tried to rearrange his facial expression into anything other than dumb shock._

_The man wasn’t supposed to be there; what experience Ren had with death (a dog, a man who used to be his father) had taught him that dead things are not allowed to exist in the living realm. That was, actually, the definition of being dead._

_Ren had seen him earlier that day, resting neatly in beautiful clothes. With his eyes closed, Anakin seemed extraordinarily tired. The effort to pull himself back into the present through a coffin of gleaming maroon wood and six feet of wet red earth must have been exhausting, especially with it being so very late at night._

It was certainly Anakin, Ren _thought,_ but far younger _. His hair hung long like Ren’s own, but was the color of wheat. It didn’t even faintly resemble that of his grandson, which fell over his ears in a shade of dark like the kind that exists between subway trains._

_Anakin was real enough to engage with, and Ren decided to try._

_“Granddad.”_

_Leia’s father stared intensely out of the smudged window and past the bridge, as if he were searching for a specific constellation above the dull skyline._

_There were no stars. Something about the city blocked them out with an orange and polluted ferocity._

_Anakin nodded, barely moving, as if he were intently and joylessly watching a Yankees game through river-tumbled eyes._

Leia _, he heard him think. Then, his birth name._ Benjamin _._

_Both men loved the Yankees.  They’d won this year, the whole thing, and Anakin and Ren watched it from the couch in the apartment below. The television’s blue glow would wash over his grandfather’s emaciated, scarred face like water. Anakin was happy then, so the Ren assumed things were okay._

_The apparition watched the bridge, and faded._

 

Nobody lived there anymore. Ren had bought Hux a Coke Zero from the Russian grocery store across the street from the buildings. Ren parked by the dumpsters, behind the apartment houses.

Hux leapt out of the vehicle first and walked at a brisk clip past chain link and squash courts up to the boardwalk. He turned, dark grey pea coat draped over his shoulders, and looked only a little majestic when the sea breeze caught it and lifted it slightly, cape-like, from his back.

 

Ren looked enough like the other tenants, knew enough to say _adank_ when they held the door to the lobby open, whispered _macht shnell_ when Hux took a moment too long to enter the elevator, wondering from where exactly this multilingual creature had sprung. They waited for the man and his shopping cart to exit on the seventh floor, and then continued up thirteen more.

Ren had to shoulder his way into the home. He didn’t own a key. Han had owned the last one, nobody had really gone in there after Anakin died except for him. The lock was shitty anyway.

It was the same.

Hux entered slowly, stepping over the pile of junk mail on the mat. His eyes caught something nailed to the wall. His hands wandered over to the dinner bell. It clanged. Ren’s shoulders jumped for a second to hover by his ears, and then relaxed. He snapped his eyes toward Hux.

“Don’t touch that.”

Hux swallowed. There was a painting—a beautiful oil painting—behind Ren’s head.

“You do know the original was stolen thirty years ago. Worth two hundred million.”

“Hmnh.”

Ren absolutely knew. His father died for that fucking painting.

 

The roof was so cold.  A flickering wind gusted over the skyline, the setting sun stained the clouds red. _Shabbat shalom_ , Ren thought, not without a bitter hint of irony.

Hux helped Ren to lug it up the stairs and through a door and up the ladder and then to the roof. Ren leapt back down the way they had come and returned with the charcoal lighter fluid. Placing it on the ground beside _The Concert_ , he caught his breath for a moment. The building hummed.

The painting and the grimy container both lay innocently on the dirty concrete. Hux nudged it with his toe and shivered. Ren held out his left hand.

Hux dug into a pocket of his coat and produced a box of matches.

Ren opened it, checked the number of matchsticks left. He watched Hux pour the liquid over the painting. It glistened coolly.

 “Just in case,” Ren whispered, a smile twitching at the left-hand corner of his mouth. He dragged the match across the thin end of the box.

The Whitestone Bridge twinkled through the smoke.


End file.
